A playwright has defended nights solely for black audiences at his West End show, saying it allows black people “to feel safe in a place where they often do not feel safe”.
Slave Play, starring Kit Harington, opens at the Noel Coward Theatre in June for a three-month run.
But the theatre will be open to an “all-black identifying audience’” to allow them to watch “free from the white gaze” on two nights in July and September. It comes after the theatre industry was criticised for a lack of diversity among its audiences, which traditionally have been overwhelmingly white.
Playwright Jeremy O Harris, said he was “so excited’ by the “Black Out nights” initiative.
He told BBC Sounds: “For me, as someone who wants and yearns for black and brown people to be in the theatre, who comes from a working-class environment, who wants people who do not make six figures to feel like theatre is a place for them, it is a necessity to radically invite them in with initiatives that say, ‘You’re invited. Specifically you.’”
He added: “There are a litany of places in our country that are generally only inhabited by white people, and nobody is questioning that, and nobody is saying that by inviting black audiences here you are uninvited.
“The idea of a Black Out night is to say this is a night that we are specifically inviting black people to fill up the space, to feel safe with a lot of other black people in a place where they often do not feel safe.”
It is understood that the audience for the shows will be achieved by distributing invitation-only tickets through black community groups.
The concept was pioneered in New York for the original 2019 production of Harris’s Slave Play which explores race, identity and sexuality in 21st-century America.
